Raising Children Multilingually: How?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If/when I have kids*, I’d like them to know as many languages** as possible. How can this be done?

So far, my nefarious plan is something like this:

  1. Meet and marry a woman who does not speak English or French, but who speaks Esperanto as I do. The resulting household and family*** would be trilingual: English, Esperanto, and whatever the woman’s birth-language is.

  2. If still living in a city like Toronto, where English is the common interlanguage among different linguistic groups, send the kinds to French-immersion school from kindergarten.

It seems to me than this would give the kids a potential for four languages**** from the start.

There’s a time during childhood that kids just soak up languages, right? Is there a limit to how many languages can be learned? Do too many languages in the day-to-day family environment confuse a child or have a bad effect on a child?

Has anyone on the SDMB deliberately tried raising kids to be multilingual?

[sup]* I don’t even have an SO. I’m planning ahead. So sue me. :slight_smile:

** Human languages, not C or Java. Though I certainly don’t mind if they know computer languages as well…

*** I have heard of this actually happening.

**** I’d like somehow to round things out with Spanish and/or Chinese, but that’s just a detail.[/sup]

2

My French teacher said that in order for the children not to confuse the different languages, but to have clear and perfect knowledge of each language as a separate and usable entity, they must hear each language from only one parent, and only one language from each parent - eg. Mommy only speaks in French, Daddy only speaks in English. Otherwise they’ll mix the two languages up in their heads and speak franglais.

3

Well, my daughter and I started learning French together when she was about 3. She kept it up and speaks it better than I do. Lots better.

Both of my kids were getting Spanish lessons in preschool and it’s the second language taught in the Stillwater Public Schools, and we chat in Spanish around the house since I know it casually from Jr.High and teaching it in pre-school when I was a teacher.

So currently my 14 yr old is tri-lingual and my 8 yr old is bi-lingual.

The next one they’re learning is Italian but we just started that.

4

I’m almost 15 months into raising my daughter multilingually. Mom and all the relatives here in China speak Shanghaiese as a native language. Mom also speaks native level mandarin, University level Japanese, business level Cantonese and English. There is a fair amount of Mandarin spoken, which is the language of our nanny. I am a native english speaker, and also speak Mandarin. We live here in Shanghai, where Shanghaiese is the primary language spoken.

From my understanding, it’s really important that the kid has anchor languages. That is, Mom only speaks one specific language to the child. Dad only speaks on specific language to the child. Otherwise, the child gets very confused.

So, I only speak english to my daughter. I try to only speak English at home. When talking with the relatives or nanny, I have to speak Mandarin because they do not speak English.

My daughter started walking at 12 months and is barely speaking. She babbles a LOT, but only has a couple of words of Shanghaiese/Mandarin. She understands Shanghaiese, Mandarin and English.

Any one else have suggestions???

5

Thanks for the quick replies! (Not that I’m going to need this knowledge tomorrow or anything, but it’s nice to see… :slight_smile: )

So only one language per parent, and keep them rigourously separated? What happens then, if you have, say, Uncle Boris living in the house and speaking only Russian to the kid?

Can you start different languages at different times?

6

My understanding is one language per parent, although you can add a language in a group setting. For example, I speak Mandarin in a group with my daughter, and she theoretically does not get confused because it’s a Mandarin speaking group. Now, if I’m alone with my daughter and speak sometimes in English and sometimes in Mandarin, she would most likely be real confused.

When I lived in Taiwan, there were plenty of mixed marriage kids who spoke Taiwanese with anyone elderly (grandparents), Mandarin with younger Chinese, and English with anyone caucasion.

I think Uncle Boris would be fine, because he’s always using Russian with the child. Again, I know kids here who go spend summer with the grandparents, and end up speaking Swedish or whatever it is the grandparents speak. That’s the only time these kids speak that language as well, is when the grandparents are around.

7

A quick Google search for denask-l (a mailing list devoted to raising kids in Esperanto) eventually yielded a FAQ at http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/odo.html. Question six of the FAQ is: Kiel oni edukas infanon dulingve? (How does one educate children bilingually?)

The FAQ continues with question seven, Chu oni povas eduki infanon trilingve? (Can one educate a child trilingually?):

Food for thought. :slight_smile:

8

I just noticed that one of the links off the denask-l page was for The Bilingual Families Web Page. Some good stuff there.

9

My fiancee is Filipino, and is trilingual. She grew up hearing two languages at home. The common language in the Philippines is Tagalog, and the native language of her area is Cebuano. She grew up hearing a mixture of these two from her parents, and has now problem with either, nor with separating them. In nearly all public schools (which are actually private schools, but that’s a different discussion), English is one of the standard subjects from 1st grade through college, so she is conversational and literate in English. Her parents didn’t do the “one langage each” thing, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t the best way to do things.

I teach in a district where over half of the students are hispanic, and over half of those have parents or grandparents who immigrated from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. I have had students who were native bilingual through having both parents speak nothing but Spanish at home, and hearing English everywhere else, particularly on tv. Every single native bilingual student I have ever had has been above average to way above average in English language arts and reading. Every one without exception. Even those who aquire English at school seem to do better, on average, than native English-only speakers.

I’ve discussed this with my fiancee, and we’ve agreed that our children would benefit from learning Tagalog from Mommy and English from me, if only because it would boost her understanding of English to have a second language. It also would be an integral part of helping make their mother’s culture part of them. I’m glad I saw this thread, thanks for the info.

10

the best way would probably be to live in the country that speaks the language you want them to learn. i was forced to learn chinese and taiwanese this way. gag, blech

of course, you can just let them pick what language they want to learn… mom’s forcing me to learn chinese has made me permanently prejudiced against it gag again

just a tip

11

Cougarfang, would you mind sharing a little of your background? I’m just kinda mystified and certainly not trying to make any value judgements. In fact, I would appreciate more as the last thing I want to do is “make” my daughter hate Chinese.

Are you ethnically Chinese or white bread no crust American like me, do your parents speak Chinese, were you’re parents expats and decided you should speak the local language(s). What time frame was it? How fluent would you call yourself in reading and writing Mandarin, speaking Taiwanese? Why was it such a negative experience for you personally? I mean, Taiwan at least used to be a really fun place. Was the experience ruined because you could speak the language?

thanks

12

Yeah, my three year old stepson who was a late talker anyway, is now learning English and Vietnamese at the same time. He mixes them up, and sometimes I’m not sure if he realises there are two languages, but he does know duplicate words for things (mummy words and daddy words). I think it’s his mum speaking English to me in front of him that makes language separation by parent difficult. I’m sure it will all work itself out though.

13

I’m chinese american: my parents are purebred taiwanese, but i was born in america. i spent the first seven years of my childhood there, and still visit back occasionally. i’d gone through most of my education in a bilingual school, where just about everyone had been born in america and had lived for their first few years there. i still live in taiwan, actually. i’m pretty good at reading mandarin, but i’m bad at writing it. i STILL can’t get the characters straight… grrrr i’m fair at taiwanese, and can puzzle out most of the meanings in the words. i think the reason why i hate chinese is because the teachers were usually the really really strict type, and they’d make me memorize from the textbook and do all sorts of memory tricks. i have a notoriously poor memory, and often mangle characters. actually, i’ve become partially reconciled about chinese, since, well, without it, i can’t do much in taiwan. i kinda like taiwan. but, i was such a poor student (and my parents put such emphasis on grades) that it rankled me. actually, if you don’t bother them about being bad students at first, i don’t think they’d hate it as much. it takes a while to get used to the language, but my getting Cs in it (my parents automatically think that anything below an A is a catastrophe… argh) has led to some pretty unpleasant scenes.
that’s my $.02 (or more)…

14

I just read an enormous academic tome on this subject. The author’s point was simply this: Most children will learn more than one language only if they have to. Underlying the whole book is the premise that people tend toward monolingualism–meaning being truly proficient in only one language–and that multilingualism only occurs where people have to become proficient in another language in order to get by.

So, to raise your children bi- or multi-lingually, you have to live in or create a situation where the child has to speak more than one language in order to do what they want to do.

Mommy speaking only Tagalog and Daddy speaking only English will work, because the child presumably wants to speak to both mommy and daddy. Raising the Spanish-background kid in the US will work because the kid will speak Spanish to communicate with his family, but will learn English for school and to understand the TV, etc. Will he learn Russian from Uncle Boris? Depends on the nature of Uncle Boris’s relationship with the kid. Does he have a lot of interaction with the kid? Does the kid want to talk to Uncle Boris? If the kid doesn’t like Uncle Boris, then not learning Russian is a way to avoid talking to him!

Anyway, that is what the book said. (The book is Life in Two Languages by Grosjean.)

15

Here’s our story, so far:

I speak English and decent “street” German. Mom speaks English and Thai, both pretty much at a “native” level. Mom started out trying to speak Thai at home with our daughter, but is not a particularly patient person and would switch to English sometimes and when our daughter began to speak her first words were English (and “Dada”, BTW) so she gave up fairly early and spoke mostly English to her. My son was born when my daughter was 27 months old. AFAIK my wife did not attempt to speak Thai to him, at least not often.

Then, when my daughter was 30 months and my son 3 months, we moved to Geneva. We lived in Geneva for about 5-6 months. At the end of this time my daughter could speak some French, and her pronounciation was far better than mine. Neither of us parents picked up French to the point of even being conversational.

From Geneva, we moved to Germany, where we remained for about 2 years. At this point my daughter began to attend school, but to my utter disappointment they did not teach German to the children in the international school until they get to around 6th grade. Stupid, IMO. I found some children’s books in German and they would see various TV programs in German. They only had a little bit of interaction with German children, as German people do not interact with strangers very much and the children pretty much follow suit. Both my son and daughter learned some German, as I found when I was watching the Simpsons one day and my daughter started asking questions about the storyline. (This caused me to stop watching the Simpsons in front of her) They were particularly fond of words that begin with the “sch” sound, like Schnecken and Schmetterling (snail and butterfly).

Then we moved to Thailand. We got a nanny from Isaan, who spoke Thai and Isaan (a dialectic mix of Thai and Laos) with the kids. They started to get more Thai at home. At my insistence we hired a tutor to come by and teach the kids “play Thai”, eg, conversation which a child would use. Again Thai was not taught to young children at the international school. In fact, Thai was banned since most of the children at this particular school were from wealthy Thai families, so they got Thai at home and the parents were paying a premium to get their children fluent in English. Still they picked up Thai much more quickly than French or German, mainly because of the home environment.

Epilogue: we have moved back to the USA since three months ago. Mom still reads some bedtime stories to the kids in Thai but is again wandering away from using it at home. French is a distant or forgotten memory for them. They recall some German, and do know if someone is speaking German, but I imagine it will fade quickly as well. The other day my daughter, who is now almost 6 years old, told me that she doesn’t want to “be Thai”. Note that we live in Cincinnati that has more than it’s fair share of blonde haired, blue eyed little children of Germanic descent. The girl has been pretty big into fitting since seemingly forever. She told her mother the other day that she is half German since her father is German (I am not). This is her way of confusing the language with the national identity.

Part of the bitter irony of all this is that she likes German people better because Thai people “laughed at her”. In reality most Germans reacted stoically or with a slight smile when they met her. Thai people on the other hand found her extremely beautiful and engaging and would utter a polite little laugh of pleasure when meeting her. Since she didn’t understand, at least initially, that they were saying “how beautiful, how lovely” when they met her she assumed they were laughing at her, since the Germans never laughed. My son, partially by virtue of being younger, doesn’t particularly have this aversion.

16

Thanks Cougarfang. It’s tough being Chinese and then learning Chinese as a second language. I’ve seen that many times as you’re expected to be fluent 'cause you’re genetically Chinese, but white boys can say “Ni hao” and be fawned over for being so “fluent.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a lot more kids of mixed marriages in Asia that grew up bi-lingual than I have in the US. I think it’s because you really have to work at helping your kids become a polyglot and a lot of people figure that kids will just naturally learn. More dopers with experience, please chime in.

17

Well, here at the Olentzero household we haven’t done much in the way of raising the Tzeroling to be at least bilingual, but the sentiment is there that she ought to be.

Thinking about it, the best choices for here would probably be Portuguese (her father is from the Azores) and Spanish, since south Arlington VA is the melting pot in these here parts.

Valkyrie speaks passable Spanish, mostly in connection with her clinical work, so it looks like I will probably have to start learning Portuguese if we want the Tzeroling to be able to speak with her grandmother.

Hey, what the heck - it’s another language, eh? :smiley:

18

Does anyone find that there are pressures to NOT be multilingual, to learn only English and abandon the other parental languages? One of my friends came from a Flemish background and said that her parents refused to teach her Flemish. She couldn’t communicate well with her grandparents and now strongly regrets not learning the language in childhood.

19

Sunspace, yes. This has been a bone of contention in my family. When my great-grandmother emigrated to the States, she flat out refused to ever speak Italian again. As a result, her native language was lost to her children, who learned to speak fractured English instead. Three generations later, we are trying to reclaim a bit of that.

Anecdotally, I have a cousin who married a native Spanish speaker. She spoke only English to her children, he spoke only Spanish. For a short while when their children were learning to talk, they spoke mangled Spanglish, and as a result they were all somewhat delayed in speaking in complete sentences in either language. From my observation, this cleared up entirely by the time the kids were in preschool, and now all three kids are fluent in Spanish, English, French (a conscious choice the whole family decided to learn together) and all are now also learning Italian in high school.

IMO, multilinguality (is that a word?) is a Very Good Thing, and I think the important thing is to make sure whoever speaks to the child is fluent in whatever they speak. I know this because of my pathetic attempt to teach my child my own half-assed high school Spanish, much to the amusement of my Spanish-fluent friends.

20

I strongly suspect that the pressure towards only English is less here in the “English-speaking parts” of Canada than in the States. (Canada is officially bilingual English/French.)

In Toronto, at least, there are speakers of over a hundred languages. Every day I hear Cantonese and Polish and Mandarin and Italian and Serbian and Spanish and Esperanto and Portuguese and Greek and German and even French, as well as English.

I imagine that this multilingual environment leads to greater gut awareness of the reality of other languages from an early age, and less tendency to think of them as ‘foreign’. This would not necessarily lead to learning the other languages (I don’t learn Farsi just from listening to people on the subway, for instance), but it might work against setting up an unconscious attitude that There Is Only One Real Language.

That doesn’t mean that, if emigrating, I would not want my kids to learn the language of the country I moved to, but I see no reason to discourage the learning of the ancestral language as well. LifeOnWry, do you know why your great-grandmother stopped speaking Italian?

BTW, I always wince when I see another English-speaking Canadian refer to French as a ‘foreign’ language. It isn’t! Not here…